Thursday, February 25, 2016

I Don't Feel the Bern Cuz the Bern Don't Feel Me

What are the issue(s) that are deal breakers for you? Abortion? Affirmative Action? Single-payer health care?

Mine's war. Or actually, Peace. And if you're not working for Peace you're working for war.

Jill Stein

So, to my knowledge, there are two candidates who are working for Peace and one of them is not Bernie Sanders. Those 2 are Jill Stein* and Mary Scully.

(*The Greens still have their convention to choose a candidate and there are others running, but Stein's campaign is miles ahead of the others. It's close to a lock.)

In the 2016 election, even if you vote for anyone who is a Democrat or Republican you are supporting war. Yeah, I know about Bernie's vote against the Iraq War, but he's voted for funding for every war since. He supports Israel's genocide, Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, and drone warfare which kills innocent children. He has voted for the funding for all of this. That's not a campaign pledge, that's working for something. There's my line. Peace. Bernie and all the other Democrats and Republicans have crossed it. They will not get my vote.

You Can't Have the Perfect Candidate

No, you can't.

And when I vote for Jill Stein, I won't be voting for the perfect candidate. I don't agree with the Greens on banking nor the economy in general (though the Greens will be voting on a platform plank this August that I'm very excited about). But I feel that overall the Green's platform has a more realistic and spelled out plan with the Green New Deal, reparations, renewable energy and yes, single-payer health care. In fact, the Greens would pay for single-payer with the money saved by reducing the military budget. See, there's that war issue again.

Quacks Like A Duck

So the argument has been made that people like me should feel the Bern because Sanders has a legitimate chance to win. I have a problem with that on two levels. First, I don't think he has that great of a chance to win the primary. The Democratic Party has seen to that. Second, after decades of being an "independent", voting with the centrist Democrats 98% of the time, he officially slid over to the corporate-owned party to run for President. He has said that if he loses he will tell his supporters to get behind Hillary.

That tells me that if he were to win, he would be too beholden to do the things he says he will do. Don't believe me? Remember Candidate Obama? He talked about single-payer, jailing bankers, closing Gitmo, and ending wars. (Which he hasn't - don't believe the hype.) Bernie's quack sound like Obama's quack.

We Can't Let Trump / Cruz / Rubio Win...

There's the lesser of two evils camp. Then there's the voting doesn't make a difference camp. I subscribe to neither. Voting is but one tool to use for change. Campaigns are awesome ways to bring people together to talk about issues (though they're not always used that way). This is true nationally and locally.

But when the election is over our jobs aren't done. We still need to be in the streets and in the media fighting to end war and corporatization. So I don't care who wins this election because no matter who it is, I'll still be fighting. Whether it's Trump, Clinton, Sanders or even Stein. What are you doing after the election?